Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger first impressions

(10.4.1, actually...)

Graphics operations do seem faster; I'm currently running at a resolution that taxes my video card, and things like full-screen QuickTime VR panning are noticeably faster now.

Now that Spotlight's indexed my drive, it's pretty remarkable. I haven't used it enough to know how usable it is, but it sure is fast. I don't like the use of grayed-out labels and icons in the search results dialog; things that look like they're inactive aren't.

The idea of Dashboard is interesting—an environment for extremely easy-to-develop tiny little apps—but did the user interface for these things really have to be totally different from, oh, everything else in the entire system? Keyboard shortcuts don't even seem to do what you'd think they do.

It really feels half-finished, and also a little like Apple is trying to invent desk accessories again after gradually erasing the distinction between them and everything else years ago. I'm a little uneasy about the duplication of services that results. The new dictionary feature has a dictionary application, a dictionary service and a dictionary Dashboard widget. The iTunes miniplayer widget now coexists with the minimized iTunes app and the iTunes dock-icon controls. There's a Stickies widget as well as the original Stickies app (unless that's gone from a pristine Tiger installation; I don't know). It all seems a bit redundant. I will grant that Stickies do seem like a natural thing to put on a separate worldsheet that shows up with a magic keystroke.

That said, I think my favorite widget so far is the Yellow Pages one, with its one-click integration with the system address book; I can see that being immediately useful (I just got my dentist's contact information in there with a couple of clicks). I wish you could change the size of the thing, though; it's tiny. And I wish the map link brought up Google Maps rather than Mapquest; it seems like these widgets usually allow extremely little customization.

The new features generally seem to violate established UI standards in wacky ways, and it's going to take a while for me to get used to them.

Grapher versus Graphing Calculator

Many people have reported that Graphing Calculator is back in Tiger under the name of Grapher. Actually, Apple's Grapher isn't the same program; it's adapted from one of Graphing Calculator's competitors. The original is available for OS X now as a commercial program, and there's a free light version as well.

Grapher seems extremely powerful as an animated grapher, maybe even more powerful than the full Graphing Calculator. But what it's missing is the calculator feature. The original Graphing Calc was useful even as a simple expression evaluator; I would and sometimes still do bring it up just to calculate something. Typing in a complex expression algebraically was often more convenient than banging it into either a regular or RPN calculator. It could also do a few extremely simple symbolic algebra tasks (such as shifting quantities from one side of an equation to the other), though I never found that very useful.

Grapher also isn't as intuitive. Graphing Calc's user interface was so simple you didn't need any instructions; you just typed the equation you wanted and the thing would figure out what to do with it. You never had to plan in advance what kind of graph you wanted or whether you wanted one at all. Grapher actually makes you switch between modes to do different kinds of graphs.